Word: labs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Hundreds, if not thousands, of new labs are now conducting high-risk biological experiments in the U.S., with at least 15,000 technicians working daily on the world's deadliest pathogens - the vast majority of them for the first time. Though FBI background checks are required for people who handle so-called select agents - a government-drawn list of 73 highly lethal pathogens, such as Ebola, ricin and monkeypox - the vetting focuses on security, not bio-safety competence. Yet most lab accidents are due to simple human error, says Dr. Gigi Gronvall, Senior Associate at the Center for Biosecurity...
Lack of oversight means lack of policing, which often leads to underreporting of potentially fatal accidents. Labs are required by law to report mishaps with select agents immediately to the CDC, but that doesn't always happen. Case in point: Last year, a bio-lab worker at Texas A&M University became infected with the deadly brucellosis virus. The university did not report the case and may never have admitted it if an industry gadfly, Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project, had not persuaded a local district attorney to strong-arm the university into giving up its internal records...
Responding to intense criticism, the CDC is looking into forming external peer review panels to re-examine select-agent regulations and lab-safety procedures. The agency may also modify reporting requirements - possibly allowing some measure of anonymity, for example, to minimize disincentives for revealing accidents. "This is a relatively young program [which] is providing much improved oversight, but clearly there is more than we can do," says Richard Besser, director for the CDC's Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response, who defends the recent lab expansion in the U.S., saying it will lead to better diagnostics and make...
...this delights Brian Wansink, the marketing professor who runs Cornell University's food lab. That's mostly because everything delights him. Though he looks a little like the actor Aaron Eckhart, Wansink has all the nerdlike characteristics you'd expect from a mad professor: he has a brain-slammingly loud laugh, overuses the word cool and may be the world's most excitable 47-year-old. He uses this energy to keep about 50 food experiments going at various stages. Most of these studies underscore the lack of conscious decision making that goes into how much, and what...
...message out, Wansink conducts some of his lab studies in unscientific, attention-grabbing ways that many of his academic peers find showboaty. Some dismiss his work as "Happy Meal studies." Wansink counters that his approach hits people where they live--and eat. "Once you're in a bar giving people chicken wings, people say, 'Oh, I can relate to that,'" he says, referring to an experiment in which he showed that subjects watching the Super Bowl at a bar ate 28% more chicken wings when the waitresses cleared the bones from the table than when the bones piled up. "That...